Campaigners have called for misogyny to be made a hate crime for years – but it’s possible this could do more harm than good
Over the last few years, we’ve seen an alarming number of hate crimes towards minorities in the UK. We’ve witnessed race and religious hate crimes after the Brexit referendum in 2016, a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, and far-right counter-protests and attacks against the Black Lives Matters movement in 2020.
In October, the Home Office reported that hate crimes increased by 26 per cent in the UK between March 2021 and March 2022. The official statistics revealed a 19 per cent increase in race-based hate crimes, a 37 per cent increase in religious hate crimes, a 41 per cent increase in hate crimes based on sexual orientation, a 43 per cent increase in disability hate crimes, and a staggering 56 per cent increase in transgender hate crimes. Even though race-based hate crimes accounted for the lowest increase, they were the most reported type of hate crime, with more than 100,000 recorded by the police.
In response to all this violence, the ‘solution’ has always been the same: to enact stricter and hasher hate crime legislation. In 2021, Labour pledged ‘tougher’ and ‘fairer’ hate crime laws to keep LGBTQ+ people safe. In 2022, after the murderers of Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, calls to make misogyny a hate crime grew louder, but ministers rejected the bill. After Jeremy Clarkson’s racist and misogynist remarks about Megan Markle in The Sun, the demand to classify misogyny as a hate crime has started up once again.
On paper, it makes sense to ask for more policing and stricter hate crime legislation when our communities are consistently under threat. We’ve always been taught that justice requires some sort of punishment, and to receive that punishment, we must rely on prisons and the police. There is no alternative. But does this reliance on the police and hate crime legislation actually keep us safe?
Dr Sarah Lamble, Reader in Criminology and Queer Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, believes that hate crime legislation only provides marginalised people with an illusion of safety. Hate crime laws are framed as ‘prevention-oriented’, legislated to deter people from causing harm. But hate crime laws are actually “punishment driven,” explains Lamble in their essay ‘The False Promise of Hate Crime Laws’. Hate crime laws add “harsh penalties for convictions only after a harm has occurred.” In other words, these laws don’t prevent violence from occurring. Instead, they impose more severe punishments that, in reality, fail to deter people from committing these crimes.
Hate crime laws are appealing because they can offer people tangible proof that their pain is seen and believed. But these laws often hurt the ones they’re meant to help the most. “[Hate crime legislations] encourage the funnelling of more resources into a criminal justice system that was never built to protect us,” explains writer and author Leah Cowan. Those typically convicted under hate crime laws come from racially and economically marginalised groups, because the police were created specifically to target, control and criminalise those groups. This is not to say that people in these groups who are sent to prison have not committed any harm, but as Lamble argues in their essay, “those who actually enact the most harm in society are the least likely to go to prison.” From politicians to police officers, their wealth, status and privilege offer them shield against criminalisation.
“[Hate crime legislations] encourage the funnelling of more resources into a criminal justice system that was never built to protect us” – Leah Cowan
Hate crime legislation only inflates the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex. Through this framework, the root causes of hate crimes are never fully addressed, and the state can continue to avoid responsibility for passing dangerous laws and legislation that allow prejudicial beliefs to flourish in this country. It does not seek to address harm or support the victim and the communities most affected. Calls for more policing are also counterproductive to the work we’ve seen done by countless activists since the murders of George Floyd, Chris Kaba and Sarah Everard, who all died at the hands of the police.
Criminalisation is not the answer, but abolition is. Dylan Rodriguez, a founding member of the abolitionist organisation Critical Resistance, told Teen Vogue last year that an abolitionist framework encourages “mutual aid that de-prioritises condemnation of individual perpetrators (Black, Brown, and otherwise) and cultivates infrastructures of accountability to other communities, organisations, and movements struggling for liberation.” Even though it’s difficult to imagine a world like this, where we don’t rely on the police and prisons to produce justice, we must. Because prisons and the police do not make social problems go away; instead, as political activist Angela Davis asserts, “they simply make human beings disappear.”